Latest #converso Posts

ALEXANDER MAY / PELICAN (1963) BY ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG / NEW YORK
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#50 Converso Creative Director Alexander May (@83am) shares the 50th and final contribution for The Task of the Translator, which can be viewed in its entirety at converso.online.
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. “I would like to thank all the contributors of this digital initiative, for which I am eternally thankful for the support and co-curation of Marcelo Alcaide and AC.O. This collection of imagery, video and poetry provided abstract and visual cues for what was happening in the world this year, and in a way that made sense to me. What became clear in these fifty contributions is a conclusion shared with Walter Benjamin in the title essay that gave this project its working format: Art is not primarily about communication. “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience.” .
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For my own contribution, I thought about recompositions of social engagement and restraint, and was led to a black and white 16mm film of Robert Rauschenberg’s “Pelican” performance from 1963 in New York. The use of the circular sail felt like an awkward interpretation of maintaining distance and reflected the newfound performativity of social engagement in absence of touch.”
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#049 The field of neuroscience should look elsewhere for synergies if they are to make tangible improvements to the wellbeing of the world. Although emotions such as sadness and worry are experienced globally, to extrapolate from this and conclude that diagnostic systems from developed countries, such as the ICD, the DSM, and the Research Domain Criteria project by the US National Institute of Mental Health, can be appropriately applied on a global scale is ﬂawed logic and might produce serious consequences.

Professor and Chair of the Dept of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town Dan J. Stein and his colleagues state that the DSM-5 “encourages a cultural formulation,” but seem not to realise that a DSM-based cultural formulation is still a doctrine from developed countries that might be imposed in a neo-colonial way onto lower-income countries to usurp their beliefs and explanations.
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For the penultimate contribution of The Task of the Translator, Marcelo Alcaide appropriates an excerpt of correspondence texts between between:
China (YH); Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada (AP); Department of Psychiatry and MRC/ Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK (BJS); Head of Science Strategy, Performance & Impact Science, Wellcome Trust, London, UK (JW); and the Department of Population Health, London.

The full correspondence can be read at converso.online / link in bio
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Image: Marcelo Alcaide, Bundle (2020). Marcelo Alcaide (b. 1989, PT) is an artist and cultural producer living between Paris, Berlin and Sao Paulo. He is the founder of A.CO and REIF.LIFE.

#048 KELSEY LU / TRANSMISSION
___________________ “A word that can define the passing of diseases, and the passing of power through machinery. Both are an act of passing. Humans creating machines that create diseases that create machines to study them to better understand how to better control them, to control the passing of them. Microscopes are machines that humans created that pass off such information. This is my throat under such a machine. Millions Of veins, my mycelial network of blood cells. On a constant mission to transmit blood throughout my body.”
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Converso stands in solidarity with all those fighting against police brutality and social inequality. We’ve published a link to America’s May 28 Resistance Funds at converso.online / link in bio. Please share and support.
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#047 New York-based artist Susanne Oberbeck, aka No Bra (@therealnobra), shares a poem in light of the "transmission" of social unrest currently spreading throughout the United States. Converso stands in solidarity with all those fighting against police brutality and social inequality, and has shared a link to a list of May 28 Resistance Funds along with this contribution on its website. Please share and support via converso.online / link in bio
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#046 Margarida Mendes (@sea_and_fog) shares a photograph and field recording from a rainy evening in Nuquí, Chocó Jungle, Colombian Pacific, in 2019. Mendes is a writer, curator, and educator. In 2009, she founded the project space The Barber Shop in Lisbon, where she hosts a programme of seminars and residencies dedicated to artistic and philosophical research. Exploring the overlap between cybernetics, philosophy, sciences, and experimental film, her personal research investigates the dynamic transformations of materialism and their impact on societal structures and cultural production. Listen to “Night Rain in Chocó Jungle” in full via converso.online / link in bio
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#029 Gigiotto Del Vecchio (@supportico) and Stefania Palumbo (@stefamarta)are Berlin-based curators from Napoli. They founded Supportico Lopez and are currently Chief Curator and Associate Director of Archivio Conz (@archivioconz), respectively. Del Vecchio and Palumbo have interpreted the majority of Converso's glossary in order to collage a visual story of the pandemic's intimate effects on their life and work, which can be viewed in full at converso.online

Reflecting on "Comradeship," the duo also share an excerpt from Geoffrey Hendrick's text "From Job Interview to FluxLux, a 32 year friendship with Bob Watts" along with the photograph above.

#027 James Jeanette (@jamesjeanettewilddaughter) shares an original watercolor from lockdown in London. His band, Wild Daughter (@wild_daughter_), navigate punk-romantic notions of desire, mysticism, addiction, androgyny, and the joy of sexuality and gender fuckery. Read more at converso.online
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#026 Eight photographs from Matthew Lutz Kinoy. “These are photographs of the doors in the studio. Some open, some closed. One opening on northern Italy lifted from a painting by Francesco Guardi, extracted from a castle near Udine. Another opens on a Burle Marx designed public plaza in Rio de Janeiro with a white orchid string-fastened to a tree. There is a painting of the patron saint of Palermo receiving a crown of flowers from an angel. The rest of the doors open onto the room itself, one after another.”
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#044 Asad Raza shares a concrete, anagrammatic text in original email format. Using the words, "ever," "veer," and "reve" (French for "dream"), the text suggests infinite détournements and imagined worlds. Raza combines experiences, living beings and objects in his artistic practice; his solo exhibition “Untitled (plot for dialogue)” ran at Converso from November 4th to December 16th, 2017.
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#043 Akeem Smith (@akeemouch) is a New York-based artist who has been defining fashion’s underground for brands including Helmut Lang and Hood by Air. The artist's first major solo presentation, “Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test”, was scheduled to open on April 10th, 2020, at Red Bull Arts, New York (@redbullarts).
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TTOTT / PAUL COURNET / CONNECT WITH THE ANIMALS EVEN IF YOU CAN’T LEAVE YOUR HOUSE
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#042 The video work combines found footage of TV news reporting the presence of animals in urban environments during the Covid-19 lockdown. Paul Cournet (@paulcournet) is an architect at OMA*AMO (@oma.eu).
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Join VERSO LIVE on Thursday 28 May 9.30am and discover how Learning is Messy!

Learning is a messy and complex process, yet it provides authentic and real-world learning experiences to children, who are always eager to discover.
Nick Garvin, our Early Years Cohort Leader will share his experiences on how learning can go in many directions and the various interdisciplinary skills that children can pick up